Secrets To Building A Lasting Relationship With Your Subscribers

I get a lot of questions from people asking me how to build the relationship with their new subscribers when building their list. People fail to do this or don’t do it properly and as a result email open rates fall through the floor and then they end up thinking that Email marketing does not work.

Despite what you may hear from some people, Email marketing is still a very powerful way to market to people. Therefore, whatever you do, you should make sure as a marketer that you do email.

Admittedly it is not always the easiest. You cannot simply setup a followup sequence and send the odd broadcast email. You need to build the relationship with your new subscribers so that they grow to know, like and trust you. It is not until they know like and trust you that they will start to buy from you….

However, if you do this step the right way you can build a large base of raving fans.

The first thing you need to do when setting up a new email marketing campaign is to work out what you are trying to achieve with the campaign. If you don’t know what you are trying to acheive then it will be difficult to succeed. Examples of common email marketing campaign goals would be to make more sales, or to get your customers to take a survey or give feedback. Perhaps you are just trying to drive more traffic or simply trying to increase your customer retention.

So now that you have worked out your email marketing campaign goal you are ready to put the campaign together.

Your welcome email is the first email your new subscribers will receive and is therefore the first impression they will get of you. Therefore, you should give them a big warm welcome, thank them for joining and let them know that you appreciate them.
Let them know what to expect and let them know about the value they will receive.

In addition to the importance of your welcome email you should also pay close attention to your opt-in thank you page. Most autoresponders use a default thank you page which is pretty impersonal. You should use a custom thank you page which includes the same elements as your welcome email as well as a photo and should be personal and engaging.

Next up, all of your emails should come from you and not some business or company name. Again this adds the personal touch and makes it more likely that your subscribers will actually open your email.

Following on from that make the content of your emails personal too. Write like you are writing to a friend. Tell stories as everyone likes to hear a story. It is the way we have evolved over 1000’s of years of passing on information through stories.
Make your content valuable and engaging and add emotion where appropriate. Most of all be yourself. Sure, not everyone is going to like you but that is normal. not everybody likes everybody else. If you just be yourself the right people will like you and thats what is important. These are the people who will become your raving fans over time.

Use personalization in you emails too. This assumes of course that you are capturing your subscribers First names at least. All auroresponders allow for this and it has been proven that personalization works so use it if you can.

Another great way to create engagement and interaction is to ask questions in your emails and encourage your subscribers to respond. This is great for showing that you are a real person and further building that relationship with your subscribers. This also allows you to learn more about your audience, what are the struggles and what do they need help with. This gives you the advantage of then knowing what to offer to your customers and subscribers. It also has the added benefit of keeping you out of the SPAM folder because many applications such as Gmail, when they see that you reply to an email, take it as a signal that you are conversing with a friend.

Finally, never stop emailing. The more you email out the better the relationship will be that you build with your subscribers. Not only that but you will become better and more comfortable at writing emails and that in turn will also help in the relationship building process.

Anyway, I think there is enough information there now to get you thinking about how you can use these various methods in your own email sequences.